Nation World

Discrimination of working mothers persists in Japan

TERUE SUZUKI. In japaneses society, when a woman chooses to work instead of staying at home to look after her husband she's called a devil wife. (The Denver Post | NATIONAL ARCHIVES)

TOKYO — To resume work after the birth of her first child, Terue Suzuki moved back to her family home on weekdays to get help with baby-care, leaving her husband in the house they shared.

"It was like a weekend marriage," Suzuki, 45, who works at a Japanese telecommunications company, said of the arrangement that started 14 years ago. "I had a satisfying job and really wanted to go back to it. In Japanese society, when a woman chooses work instead of staying at home to look after her husband, she's called a devil wife."

Limited day care, peer pressure and job inflexibility mean Suzuki remains a minority in Japan, where 70 percent of women quit work with the birth of their first child, said Nana Oishi, a professor at Sophia University in Tokyo. That level compares with about a third in the United States, according to Goldman Sachs.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's government set a goal in July to boost the proportion of working women within eight years to spur an economy that has had two recessions since 2007. Increasing the number of employed women might bolster gross domestic product by as much as 15 percent, according to Goldman Sachs.

Encouraging women in the workforce "has to be a top-down response," said Christine Wright, head of the Japanese unit of Hays Plc, a London-based recruitment company. "The most important change is awareness."

Suzuki, a senior manager in cloud-computing services, had the support of her husband and her employer, who let her switch departments to leave work on time.

Advertisement

She moved to her parents' place in Yokohama, about a half-hour train ride southwest of Tokyo, in 1998 after failing to find a day-care center for her son near her marital home. Her sister quit a temporary job and looked after the child for six months until an opening came up at a nursery near her parents' house. Suzuki continued with the "weekend marriage" when her second child was born, in total for about eight years.

A Japanese newspaper nicknamed her oniyome, meaning devil wife, in an article on flexible office schedules that highlighted her determination to go back to work rather than become a housewife to care for her family.

In a survey conducted in 2010 of more than 6,000 couples in Japan, 70 percent of respondents said mothers should stop working to focus on raising their children, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.

The availability of child-care places, at 166 per 10,000 people, which trails 210 in Britain and 365 in Australia, has also been a deterrent for women.

While Japan topped the list of 144 countries for innovation capacity in the World Economic Forum's latest Global Competitiveness Report, it placed 87th for women's participation in the labor force, the lowest ranking among Group of Seven nations except Italy.

Some women also felt they were passed up for promotion when they became pregnant, or had it delayed until they returned to work, said Lanis Yarzab, a director at Robert Walters Japan K.K.

"This is a type of discrimination that is not frequently discussed in Japan," she said.

Suzuki said she doubts Japan can reach a point where the majority of women will stay with their company after their first child. "Most mothers are still there to meet their sons after they finish school for the day," she said. "Women are the ones who are building the expectations of their sons for how a mother acts."